Borrowed Time, Borrowed World, and Borrowed Eyes with which to Sorrow it

Following up on our discussion last week regarding the role of God In “The Road”, I’d like to point out several passages from the latter half of the novel which help clarify our discussion. Sam had mentioned that the father is an Abrahamic figure in the novel, a god-like persona due to the fact that he persists in surviving no matter the hopeless odds. This seems to be echoed in the novel when, at the very end, the son claims “He tried to talk to God, but the best thing was to talk to his father”. The family the son is now with seems to have religious inclination, and it further seems as if they are attempting to impose it on the boy in order to help him overcome the hopelessness of a god-forsaken world. His apparent purity, and his inability to ‘find god’ per se (except in the figure of his father) suggest that McCarthy is making a statement here regarding the viability of religion in these circumstances. Instead of attempting to find a supreme potententate (if you will) in the sky during these post-apocalyptic times, perhaps we should search for the kindred soul with whom we share our bread, our warmth, our life. Our journey. Sam also mentioned in his most recent topic, the idea of a ‘cosmic unity’ in the face of the absence of an omnipotent God. This cosmic unity, as he correctly suggests, would be the unyielding power of love—love for our most kindred connections, for those who share our journey, and in some cases—our blood. In The Road, the power of love between the father and the son cannot be underestimated, and is in fact the driving force of the novel. It is this connection which is so strong, that replaces God in the post-apocalyptic wasteland they travel in. In this sense, The Road is more of a religious story than ‘Glorious Appealing’ which focuses on omnipotence, supremacy, power and bloody violence in order to amplify its message of organized and fundamentalist religion.